
arte jfix^i Cf)urcf) of Cfjrigt 
in ^arttorb 

^te ileamns of Victor? anb Ideate 



^ Sermon hv Uje Minisitet 
vITIjanfegQibing Bap, 1918 



Wi^t ileaning of "^ittorp antr ^eace 



A SERMON 

PREACHED AT THE 

THANKSGIVING SERVICE 

OF 

THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST 

AND 

THE SECOND CHURCH OF CHRIST 

IN HARTFORD 

THANKSGIVING DAY 

NOVEMBER 28, 1918 



BY 

ROCKWELL HARMON POTTER, D. D. 

MINISTER IN THE FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST 






Gift 
Author 
DEC 13 idiu 



tKfje ileaning of "Victor? anb Peace 

Text:— Psalm CXXVI: 3 — " The Lord hath 
done great things for us, Whereof we are 
gladr 

We thank God that our Thanksgiving is 
not one of pride. The victory that has been 
won was not won by us alone. Here is 
nothing for frantic boast or for foohsh word. 
Chateau Thierry and St. Mihiel are great 
names now in the history of the world, thank 
God. They are radiant names in the history 
of America. But there are other great 
names in the history of the world, the Marne 
and Verdun and Vimy Ridge, names that 
will shine as long as the world's history is 
remembered and read, and these names are 
not written on the pages of American 
history. I am not one of those who would 
lament because this is so. I am one of 
those who would remember that it is so, lest 
I be foolish and boastful in a day when it 
behooves me to be humble in my thanks- 
giving. 

A first reason for our Thanksgiving is that 
no one nation observes it alone. Not 
America. For all that we did, all that we 
are doing, all that we ever can do, has been 



4 The Meaning of Victory and Peace 

made possible and will be made possible by 
the service and the sacrifice unto the utter- 
most of Belgium and France and England 
and Italy, and that shining roll of the lesser 
peoples who "resisted even unto blood, 
striving against sin." Our's it was as a 
nation to have part in the final victory. 
But the part we had and have was made 
possible for us by them. And it is not a 
time for thanksgiving on the part of France 
or Italy or Belgium or England alone, nor 
of all of these together, ''for apart from us, 
they were not made perfect," "God having 
provided some better thing," a thing which 
concerned us and involved us in their sacri- 
fice as in their triumph. Therefore it is 
meet for us in humility to be thankful. 
''Still stands thine ancient sacrifice, 
An humble and a contrite heart.'' 
We are not grateful for peace if by peace 
we mean, as many who do not think, seem 
to think we mean, the cessation of strife. 
The call to cease firing is no blessing save as 
the purposes of the firing have been attained, 
save as those purposes were worthy to abide 
when the firing has ceased. Peace is no 
negative thing in a world made up of mighty 



The Meaning of Victory and Peace 5 

forces that move on in obedience to the 
movement of the primal will of God or that 
move on in disobedience to His eternal laws, 
but that in any case move on. Peace is the 
issue of that ordering of these forces by 
which they move in obedience to God's will, 
and not contrary to it. We are not thank- 
ful for a peace which means simply that 
fighting has ceased. 

And we are not thankful for victory. 
Victory has quite as often been shameful as 
noble in the history of the wars of this sad 
old world. Those victories are to be remem- 
bered with gratitude which are victories of 
righteousness and so worthy to abide. 
Neither the word peace nor the word victory 
give adequate content for the Christian's 
psalm of thanksgiving. He is able to sing 
hymns of praise only as he is assured that 
his victory is the victory of righteousness, 
and that the peace promised is the peace of 
an ordered world wherein the life of man shall 
move in obedience to the will of God. 

To offer worthy thanks for victory then, 
we must review the motives which led us 
and our allies to undertake the war, and 
assure ourselves that it is our triumph in the 



6 The Meaning of Victory and Peace 

serving of those motives, concerning which 
we give thanks to Almighty God. 

We may remember then that the dominant 
motive which led the nations of the Entente 
into the world war and still more markedly 
the dominant motive which led our own 
nation into the war was the Christian motive 
of good will for all men, the Christian motive 
of love for humanity. It was a sense of out- 
raged human pledges; in which outrage was 
involved the brutal subjection of multitudes 
of men and women, of great hosts of piteous 
little children and of other hosts of genera- 
tions yet unborn, that led Belgium through 
the person of her gallant king, to bare her 
breast against the sword of the aggressor; 
that led France, recovering, cleansing and 
renewing her ancient faith, to give herself 
obedient to the shining ideals of her noblest 
past and to the shining hope of her still 
more glorious future in supremest act of self 
sacrifice that the future might see the salva- 
tion of her integrity, her honor and her very 
life. It was the appeal of a stricken and 
outraged humanity that led Britain to 
answer as one man to the call of war in that 
big and fateful moment when the cries of 



The Meaning of Victory and Peace 7 

jingoes on the one hand and of httle Eng- 
landers on the other hand were swallowed 
up in the crusading cry of England as she 
answered "God wills it." 

In three fearful years of blood and flame 
other motives that were born out of a 
past misshapen with iniquity and stained 
with sin, were consumed as the dross in 
the flame. And from the chancellories of 
the allied nations round the whole circuit 
of Europe's lines of fire and steel, one 
motive, dominant at the first, became 
the exclusive motive of the nations allied 
in the great war. It has been the motive 
of saving humanity from the despotisms 
of the far past, and the materialisms of 
the near past and the fearfully threatening 
present; to the spiritual ideals which have 
ever hung over the nations of the world, and 
which were revealed by the light of battle 
to be shining clear in heaven's radiance above 
the contending hosts, beckoning the world 
into a glorious future. 

In such a moment our own nation 
entered the war, moved by such a clear 
shining motive, inspired by such a holy 
ideal. If we give thanks for victory it 



8 The Meaning of Victory and Peace 

is because the victory is the victory of 
armies contending with this end. Not 
because men have been killed; not because 
prisoners have been taken; not because guns 
have been captured; not iDecause standards 
have been planted beyond opposing lines of 
foes ; do we give thanks. But because prison- 
ers have been liberated; because death's 
harvest has been checked, because women 
and children have been redeemed, because 
the faint have been lifted and the falling 
upheld, because the hungry have been fed 
and the naked clothed; because not only has 
this ministry been wrought for many who 
now are living, but also because in this 
victory, little children and men and women 
and states and nations now in travail of 
birth and in generations yet unborn; — 
because these also have so been served — we 
give thanks for victory and humbly rejoice 
that unto us as a people it has been given to 
have part in so great a deliverance. 

We do give thanks for peace, but it is not 
because peace means cessation of fighting. 
It is because the peace for which pledges are 
given, the peace whose light makes glorious 
the skies in the east where the day is dawn- 



The Meaning of Victory and Peace 9 

ing, is not the peace of an absence of fighting; 
but is the peace of a concord of peoples, the 
peace that issues from the will of God, 
progressively wrought into the structure of 
the international life, into the fabric of the 
world. For this is the ultimate motive of 
this nation and our allies in the world war, a 
motive involved in the primary motive 
with which we entered the war, a motive 
increasingly apparent as we have continued 
in the war, a motive dominant now as the 
war comes to its close and issues in the 
peace that shall be. 

From the lips of the far seeing statesmen 
of every allied land, in so far as their words 
come to our ears, and supremely from the 
lips of the two great prophet statesmen — 
and there but two, these two and no more — 
whom the war has given to humanity, the 
President of the United States and the 
Premier of Great Britain — from these all 
alike and from these two supremely, comes 
the voice that is shaping the issues of the 
war, the issues that are becoming the dyna- 
mic issues of the forming peace. From these 
comes the echo of the great word of Lincoln, 
spoken in an audience room that seemed 



10 The Meaning of Victory and Peace 

once so vast and that now seems so small, 
ringing now round the circle of the world, as 
the third generation after him, having sat at 
his feet, breathes forth in this new and higher 
day his spirit for this new and greater world : 
— "With malice toward none and with charity 
for all." In this spirit the allied nations 
accept their coming victory and seek to bind 
up the wounds, not of a nation, but of a world, 
with those bonds that shall be healing for 
the present woe and that shall be life giving 
for the future welfare of humanity. 

We give thanks for a coming peace 
therefore in the terms of which the supremacy 
of truth shalt be exalted and in the continuance 
of which the supremacy of truth shall have 
its rightful dominion. Gone are the days of 
secret diplomacy and intrigue from inter- 
national relationships, as, please God, gone 
are the days of subtle deceits in domestic 
affairs and in business dealings. Come are 
the days when diplomacy shall mean pub- 
licity and truth dealing, for out of deceit 
come wars following swiftly upon the 
rumours and threats of war, and out of truth 
comes peace which is the work of righteous- 
ness forever. 



The Meaning of Victory and Peace 11 

We thank God for a coming peace in 
which righteousness shall be exalted in the 
very terms thereof, and in which righteous- 
ness shall be the safeguard of its continuance 
to us and to our children. Gone are the 
days of iniquities based upon force and the 
threats of force, of armies and armaments to 
be used as pawns in the devil's game of 
bullying and swashbuckling through the 
properties of the world on the theory that 
might makes right, that he may take who 
has the power, that he may keep who can. 
Come are the days when righteousness makes 
the strength of a nation in the affairs of 
international relationships, as we trust the 
days are come when righteousness makes 
the success and marks the career of men in 
domestic affairs, in commercial and indus- 
trial relationships. 

We thank God for a peace which exalts 
and holds sacred the worth of the individual, a 
peace that assures this by the terms in which 
it is to be written, and that is to be guarded 
for our children and our children's children 
by this sacred talisman written upon its 
parchments and realized in its life. Gone 
are the days of the kings and the princes. 



12 The Meaning of Victory and Peace 

the earthly potentates that strut their little 
day upon the stage of the world's life and 
obsess the minds of men with their vaunted 
prerogatives and their unholy privileges. 
Come are the days of the plain man, of 
human worth, when a peasant's tears shall 
be as precious as ever were those of a queen, 
and the cry of the babe in the tenement as 
tenderly heard by the common life, as the 
sob of the prince in his chamber in the 
palace. Come are the days when courts and 
constitutions, when ambassadors and sove- 
reignties shall discern the truth of the plow- 
boy's vision that "a man's a man for a' 
that," when small nations shall have their 
rights and the little man shall have his 
chance, when the weak peoples shall not 
perish because of their weakness, nor the 
weak folk fmd their weakness their destruc- 
tion. Much more is involved in this than 
the self-direction of Belgium or Serbia, of 
Poland and Finland. But He whose right 
it is will turn and overturn until the world's 
life, as realized among the nations, and man's 
life, as realized within every nation, shall 
answer to this string of gold. 

We give God thanks for a peace of active 



The Meaning of Victory and Peace 13 

brotherhood, a brotherhood that shall be 
recognized as its ideal in the terms in which 
the peace is proclaimed and that shall be 
continuously and progressively realized and 
so become the only safe assurance that the 
peace shall abide beyond the moments in 
which it is signed. Gone are the days when 
the law of competition ruled unchecked 
among the nations, for that way, we now 
know, lies chaos and the dark. Come are 
the days when the watchword of the nations 
shall be ''Together'' as we trust the watch- 
word of the political, the social, the com- 
mercial and the industrial life of the several 
peoples within their sovereignties, their 
states, their cities and their communities, 
shall be "Together.'' Gone are the days of 
ruinous rivalries in the making of arma- 
ments, in the building of forts and battle- 
ships, in the conscripting and furnishing of 
soldiers. Come are the days of nobler 
rivalries, the rivalries of mind and hand 
serving the commonwealth in obedience to a 
heart that pulses with good will. Thank 
God no one nation did win the war alone. 
It could not be won until it was won together. 
If we are wise enough to discern it, this is our 



14 The Meaning of Victory and Peace 

lesson written in fire and blood, written in 
sorrow and woe in letters both red and black; 
that the Kingdom of God cannot be won 
until it is won together. For this we give God 
thanks. 

If these be the things which victory and 
peace mean for us we do well to give thanks. 
If not, we might well give ourselves to a day 
of fasting, of penitence, of prayer. Now 
since these are the things which by the grace 
of God the heart of the world is determined 
that victory and peace shall mean, therefore 
let us keep the feast and not with the old 
leaven. Let us sing the song, the new song. 
Let us fall upon our knees with full hearts 
as we thank God that He has given our eyes 
to behold the light of this Thanksgiving 
Day. 



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